Fwd: O'Reilly invites you to Mashed 2008

[Nicholas Clark]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:20:01PM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Nicholas Clark <nick at ccl4.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:31:07AM +0100, peter at dragonstaff.com wrote:
> >
> >> What do you make of the following?
> >>
> >> http://www.slideshare.net/bquinn/xtech-2008-bbc-tech-refresh-and-identity-brendan-quinn-and-ben-smith
> >>
> >> http://phpimpact.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/bbc-new-infrastructure-java-and-php/
> >
> > I keep wondering how much more hardware it's going to take to serve pages
> > that way,
> 
> Presumably fewer since Java is much less resource hungry than Perl.

Is that general wisdom, or direct personal experience? And has anyone actually
quantified it?

For a straw poll of 1 instance, I remember much the opposite - once Fotango
started using Java for something, the dev server went to hell.  Previously
it had been happy to support all the developers running stuff using
mod-perl, now it was being brought to its knees by the memory demands of the
servers being run by a small subset of developers. However, to be fair, I'm
not sure that the Java servers were ever well configured for their
development role, and may well have been spawning too many threads too early.

[And is the real answer - it depends how well the code is written, and how
well it plays to the strengths of the language?]

> Choice of PHP seems a bit puzzling to me; curious what the rationale
> there was, given their using Java. They're not using a lot of the
> "good" bit of Zend either.

The "good" bit being what? A damn fast server for running PHP bytecode?

> > and how long before the system actually goes into production use.
> 
> Bloody ages, if Siemens has anything to do with it. Anyone know what
> the story is there?

No idea. But it keeps making me thing of http://despair.com/consulting.html

Nicholas Clark